As a leading innovation company with 1600 employees in Germany, United Kingdom, Austria, Serbia, Bulgaria, Singapore, Hong Kong, Portugal, Switzerland and Vietnam, Zühlke has always some ongoing and planned strategic initiatives.
Many organizations still rely on annual planning cycles with large upfront budgets, waterfall-style gate reviews, and business cases that are written solely to secure funding. The result is often a massive overload of initiatives, poor quality, delayed projects, and a fundamental disconnect between output and actual business impact. In this talk, my colleague and I share how we introduced Lean Portfolio Management at Zühlke Engineering, what we achieved in our first MVP after six months, and where we plan to go next.
How can strategy be translated into execution in a transparent, lean, and scalable way?
What This Talk Covers # In this session, we share how Zühlke introduced Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) based on SAFe and adapted it to the organizational context. We show how we built an MVP for LPM by combining a portfolio kanban, transparent epic and roadmap management, and group-wide OKRs to improve strategic alignment and decision-making.
This is the English-language version of our talk on participatory budgeting at Zühlke. Nadine Broghammer and I describe how we coached a portfolio team through a participatory budgeting (PB) event based on SAFe, and how the value stream leads collectively allocated the budget for the second half of the year. A separate post covers the German version of the same talk.
In this article, I explain what Continuous Exploration is within the SAFe DevOps Health Radar and why it is essential for building the right thing in the right way. Please note that everything discussed here is under the license of Scaled Agile, and that the Scaled Agile Framework is a framework to be used as a toolbox. Take out of this toolbox what fits your needs and what solves your problems.
In this meetup talk, Nadine Broghammer and I share our experience coaching a portfolio team on participatory budgeting based on the SAFe framework. We explain the problem with traditional top-down budget allocation and show how participatory budgeting creates transparency, fosters entrepreneurial thinking, and leads to better investment decisions.
